A Better Angel by Chris Adrian
(2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Adam Reger
Chris Adrian has an interesting biography. He wrote his second novel, The Children’s Hospital (2006), while he completed his pediatric residency. Working as a pediatrician, Adrian enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, where he wrote many of the stories collected in A Better Angel. Adrian’s old teacher, Marilynne Robinson, blurbs for him this way: “Chris Adrian’s life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor . . . as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes.”
Whether you consider this statement hyperbole will depend on your reading of Adrian’s stories, which share common threads of violence, grief, and the mystical. In “The Changeling,” a father exorcises a demon (actually, approximately three thousand tormented souls; more on that later) from his son by burning and cutting himself. The protagonist of “Stab” hopes to rejoin his dead brother by murdering ever-larger creatures. The title story dramatizes a drug-addicted doctor’s squandered potential by detailing his defiance of the angel who has followed him since childhood, prophesying his greatness.
The question with Adrian’s work is whether the darkness and grand scale of plots like these transcend the form and conventions of the short story. If you are inclined to believe that the father in “The Changeling” is sacrificing himself to appease the spirits that haunt his child—that this is not mere metaphor, or mental illness—you will find much of A Better Angel affecting, even revelatory. If that ending sounds like a standard-issue climax with the volume cranked up, you may find these stories a little arch, maybe even ridiculously so.
A number of the stories in A Better Angel deal explicitly with the September 11 terrorist attacks, casting the spectacular horror of that event in spiritual terms. In “The Changeling,” the narrator’s possessed son speaks with the voice of the 9/11 dead–yes, all of them. In “The Vision of Peter Damien,” images of falling people, immense silver “angels,” and burning towers afflict the children of a small Ohio town at least a century before the morning of the attacks. And in the collection’s strongest and most hair-raising story, “Why Antichrist?” a man who has died in the World Trade Center uses a Ouija board to tell the narrator that he is—you guessed it—the antichrist. Among Adrian’s great strengths is the ability to sell conceits like this one without winking at the audience or falling into self-indulgent darkness. “Why Antichrist?” is full of legitimately creepy Ouija messages like “What matters time when time is soon to end?” and “My suffering is great but yours will be greater.” But it’s also, often, disarmingly offhanded: hours after drinking holy water to show that he’s not the antichrist, the narrator reports that “the burning came again, and though I made it to the toilet this time, I had barely finished throwing up before I had to sit down and shoot black blood out of my ass.”
At times, the off-handedness of Adrian’s prose distracts. Seven of the nine stories in the collection are written in the first person, and Adrian occasionally suffers from the flabbiness and weird rhythms that can afflict first-person narratives. In the title story, the narrator says after taking a droplet of morphine that “[i]t was too good, and it made everything too beautiful, not just the angel, whose ugly skin flew off as if blown by a real hurricane wind, so her wings were clean again and her naked face and body were open and compassionate.”
Even so, the reader understands the occasional flat sentence as the price of writing (and reading) stories this ambitious in scope and theme. The stories in A Better Angel begin with images of everyday life, but use those ordinary moments as openings to something larger, something less familiar and less comforting. This is the joy of reading Chris Adrian: the sense that Marilynne Robinson is right, that the writer’s life is a grand and novel journey, and his fiction dispatches from that distant territory.